Alien Enigma (40 page)

Clemmie looked at all the symbols and frowned. "I know half or less."

"Me too," said Doug. "Let's just hope we both know different halves," he said smiling at Clemmie.

"Let's talk to the other hostages too, then we'll get back to you." Clemmie grabbed Doug's hand and held it softly.

"Thanks," said Harriette, noting Clemmie's affection and feeling somewhat jealous. She'd been too busy to really find a true soul mate-and for some strange reason, she'd fallen hard for Fred. But the robots took away his life just like one squashes a nuisance bug. And for that, Harriette swore she'd get revenge. She looked at the CIN Server and thought:
You and I are gonna be real close the next few days ...I know that somewhere deep inside your system is a solution to your inner workings ...and if it kills me, I'm gonna get it ...I'm gonna find your weakness and destroy your whole evil race!

***

Keane came out of the shower vigorously toweling his hair. A solid ten hours of sleep and the hot shower had been wonderful. There had been no water for bathing at all when he'd lain down for some much needed sleep but CPO Mura informed him that his shower was functional again when he woke. He thanked her profusely and headed directly to his private head. He tossed the towel toward the hamper and stepped out into his bedroom, knowing Mura would have a fresh uniform and undergarments waiting for him in their usual place, draped across his bed. Instead, he found the clothing was hung neatly in the opened closet because the bed was already occupied.

"Don't bother getting dressed, Trent. You'd just have to take them off again," Cindy said. The sheet with the Captain's initials on one corner covered her only to the waist. She managed a wink although he could see the sadness behind it on her face. Just like him, she had lost many close friends and comrades.

"How did you manage to get up so soon? I would have thought you'd still be dead asleep after all the long hours you've been working."

"You, too, but it seems the powers-that-be decided to give us a few hours to ourselves before the conference. Commander Dunaway and Major Rambling conspired to set the meeting back by six hours."

He sat down beside her, slid the sheet the rest of the way off her body and stretched out beside her. "Isn't it nice to have people thinking about you?"

"Very nice, so let's not waste their efforts."

He gathered her to him. Mura had to ring twice to wake him and he found that Cindy was already gone. He smiled at the memory of the hour or so they'd spent making love before falling asleep again, and began getting dressed.

***

In another part of the ship, June Mundahan held Rambling tightly. He had cried out repeatedly in his sleep after they made love. She comforted him as well as she could, just as he had done for her only a few hours earlier. She thought they would both have nightmares for years to come. She woke him gently and told him it was time to go.

Chapter Twenty-Eight: The CIN Empire

A great empire, like a great cake, is most easily diminished at the edges.

-
Benjamin Franklin

Even after being woken so abruptly, Keane found himself feeling much better. He dressed quickly in the fresh uniform Mura had prepared and headed for the main conference room. When he arrived, everyone was present except for Harriette.

"She sent word that Ms. Aguilar will fill in for her, sir," Dunaway explained from his seat beside him.

"Any explanation why?"

"Just that she's getting into portions of the CIN that she thinks contains vital data and is afraid to leave for fear she'll lose it. She didn't say exactly what it is she's after."

"Fine. We'll proceed without her for the time being, and since I also have some vital information I suppose I should go first." He sipped at his coffee and scanned the faces looking back at him while getting his thoughts in order. Rambling, XO Dunaway, Commander Mundahan, Commander Levy, Lieutenant Wannstead, and Lieutenant Chavez attending via holocom from her sickbed where she was being treated for shrapnel wounds. She was there in lieu of Commander Manheimer, who had died of wounds sustained when part of a bulkhead had been sheared off.

Lieutenant Nguyen was present and looking very unhappy, no doubt considering all the damage to the ship. COB Berry sat in his chair with his ever-present coffee cup. He handled it clumsily because of burns to his bandaged hands sustained from lifting a crucial piece of equipment that needed special gloves to handle but which had been buried under a collapsed bulkhead sheeting at the time. He used his bare hands without the least hesitation.

Lieutenant Bogarty was gone. He had led a damage control party to the central com module when communications went down and unrepentantly stayed there until it was up again-but another hit opened the compartment to space and he was sucked out through the hole before he was aware of what was happening. Former CPO Jodie Lurmen was filling in and looking rather uncomfortable in the presence of so much brass. Doug Trevanne was there representing the former captives. It was a caricature of his normal core operations officers but it was all he had left, other than a few officers and key enlisted POs who were in sickbay and still too ill to participate.

"I'll begin by telling you that should we have to leave suddenly we'd be taking a grave risk." He let that sink in a moment. "
Doc Travis
can fly but Commander Levy and Lt. Commander White, our gravitics officer, as well as Lieutenant Wannstead, tell me it would be very problematical if we attempted to enter hyperspace in our present condition. Or in other words, we'd probably blow the hell up if we tried it." The chuckles around the table helped assure him that morale was still high despite the heavy loss of life they had sustained.

"Commander Levy, and his and the Bosun's remaining crew, assure me they can get the ship space-worthy again within another few days. It could actually make it into hyperspace now for a short period of time, if it was absolutely necessary, but Master Chief Berry has a few more repairs he'd like to complete before we try it, repairs he says will keep the ship from possibly disintegrating in hyperspace. Also, we may be cramped for living space since a lot of crew quarters were hit but at least we'll be able to fly.

"This may become very important since we've learned the courier ship we saw leave stopped here only long enough to pass on a report before heading on to the planet containing the next highest CIN in its hierarchy. We can expect them back but we don't know when. That being the case, I want to wrap up everything we feel is absolutely necessary, then proceed with secondary considerations.

"Ms. Aguilar tells me that Ms. Juenne and her techs, with the assistance of some of our Navy specialists and a few surviving electronics and physics engineers from the Wannstead ships, already have most of what we need from the CIN. I'll let her report, but I can tell you now that what they've discovered is absolutely vital to Earth and the future of our species. Every death suffered during the battle to capture the CIN intact was well spent. The marines and crew of
Doc Travis
, as well as our science specialists, can be proud of their fallen comrades. They gave their lives in defense of our whole species, and the ones who survived can be just as satisfied by knowing how much their hard-fought battle meant to us all.

"That won't bring them back but their sacrifice has gained us a great deal of advanced technology we can take back with us. Much of it, such as the energy weapons the robots and Worms used, can be adapted for human use, not only for weapons but in other fields. Now then, I believe our Chief Science Officer is ready to give us her report on what has been discovered from the CIN. Ms. Aguilar?" Keane had promoted her back to her previous position. There was no question of her ability, and quite simply, there was no one else of her caliber left to fill the position. He had asked her, very politely, to keep her political and social philosophy, and her beliefs, out of her report.

"Thank you, Captain," Aguilar said. Her demeanor appeared much more subdued than the last time she attended a Captain's conference, but her briefing was done with the confidence of a scientist who had ferreted out a puzzle and solved it with skill, sweat and intelligence. "I'm giving the briefing but everyone of the team working on the CIN, the Central Intelligence Node, played a part. I'll try to relate our discoveries in a kind of order but please note that we're still organizing the raw data." She sipped at her coffee while looking down at her notes, then began.

"First, the Worms are the original species, the first intelligence of the Worm/Robot combination. The Worms invented and developed computers and kept improving them, just as we have. There might be a lesson here for us because they improved them to the point of developing artificial intelligence for their robots. The robots were very smart. With the permission of the Worms they set up a central controller to help manage all the innumerable duties the robots were being tasked with.

"When a Worm/Robot team invented the quantum drive it opened the galaxy for colonization. Since the original home planet by this time was becoming seriously overpopulated, the Worm leaders suggested that their young be implanted with a microchip at birth. Using the data gathered worldwide from the chip-implanted Worms, the robots could then assess which Worms should breed and which should not. It was also thought the microchip implanted in all Worms would help in the many and varied work situations by using it to direct the robot activities. And for a long time it did indeed work as planned, but the Worms became hedonistic and lazy as more and more of their society's planning and operation was left in the hands of robots. The CINs, which were numerous at first, directed and operated almost all aspects of Worm society, including the expansion to other planets.

"In hindsight, it was inevitable that the robots, through their CINs and eventually a Super CIN, would take over Worm society completely. It was a gradual process and probably succeeded for that very reason: the Worms didn't realize what was happening until it was too late. From that point on, the Worms worked for the robots rather than the other way around. Eventually, the robots intended to do away with almost all Worms since robots were so much more efficient, but they weren't to that stage yet.

"Now here's a point that the science team believes will be a great help in our war against the robot empire. And yes, it is and will be total war, but I'll get to that in a moment." She paused to sip her coffee and a small smile crossed her lips as she noted the surprised look on Keane's face.

"The point is that while the robots are extremely intelligent, and become more so as you go up the hierarchy of robots, from big worker robot to smaller director robot to small CINs to larger CINs and finally to the Super CIN, they remain relatively unimaginative. They really don't do much original thinking and are not very inventive. That should give us an edge in the war.

"And yes, war is inevitable because the CPU of the Xanadu CIN had a core directive, imitated from the Worms, of expansion into the Galaxy. There is no allowance or room for even a possibility of a CIN ever surrendering. They simply can't do it because it isn't in their core directives, and those directives can't be changed."

"Never?" Wannstead asked.

"Never. It isn't possible. The CINs of colony worlds will continue carrying out the expansion originally designed by the Worms. The only possible way the CINs could ever surrender would be if we could get into the CPU of each CIN and find a way to wipe out its core directive. But of course we'd have to fight our way to it, and if you think the Xanadu CIN was well defended, the one on the original home world is so well protected a single ship wouldn't get much past the outer fringes of the system, much less near the planet, and certainly not down underground to the Big Boss, the Super CIN. And before you ask, how did we gain all this information without getting into the Xanadu CIN's core directive? The answer is that we haven't. We're only reading its files, its archives.

"Having said that, if by some means we ever could get that far with the CINs, wiping the core directive should be relatively easy because the robots seem never to have thought of firewalls, complex passwords, or other defenses against outside non-physical attacks. All the CINs have are simple protective programs to prevent accidental harmful orders. The CIN readily gave us its data and allowed access to its archives once we learned the Worm computer language. And I believe we can extrapolate from this that all CINs will be essentially the same."

"So basically, we'd still have to use the brute force approach like we did here at Xanadu," Keane said.

"We think so, according to the Worm language we decoded in this CIN. There are two other robot languages in the CIN, and we've basically translated one. The other we think is just like a CIN Operating System, something like the TekPad OS. Professor Juenne is frantically working on that one, and I think she's close to a breakthrough."

That must be the reason she missed the meeting,
thought Keane. "What about the Super CIN. Do we really think it'll be that easy to change the directive?"

"It's somewhat speculative, but according to our current data it appears to be so, sir. And so far as we know, it will have to be done on each colony world and the home worlds, those first colonized, and then the Big Boss on their original home world. Just as the robots have a hierarchy, the CINs do also. The newer ones are subservient to the older ones. Each new CIN is a copy of the original CIN but with an added code making it subservient to the next oldest CIN, all the way up to the Super CIN. In case anyone is interested, the Worm name for the world where they originated is
Basik
, which you can probably guess means Earth in Worm language.

"This might be a good place to relate that during expansion into a certain area, such as the Bolt Cluster, they expand by building only one city per planet until they control the cluster and then go about developing the individual worlds. We've seen the mines they use for metals and other materials and their transport ships. And by the way, it's a good thing Captain Keane decided to nuke the mines and the transport ships or the robots would have sent the ships into the fighting. They aren't armed but they would have readily crashed into our ship or shuttles."